Halloween F
rors Empathy and
communication can help children
ease their fears
BY GINA GALLUCCI-WHITE
or some children, Halloween is an exciting day to
overindulge in candy, take on a new identity and
experience spooky decorations transform houses into
macabre homes. However, the holiday can be an anxiety-
inducing one for others.

Ghosts, spiders, blood, darkness, scary costumes, goblins and
clowns are some common fear inducers for children. Animatronic
decorations that come to life through motion sensors can also be
terribly frightening.

How can parents help tame their children’s fears of the things
that go bump in the night?
Age is a factor
Dr. Eileen
Kennedy-Moore, a
psychologist and author of “Kid
Confidence: Help Your Child Make
Friends, Build Resilience, and Develop Real
Self-Esteem” (New Harbinger Publications,
2019), notes that children tend to be scared of
things that look strange or move suddenly until
age 8. Around 9 years old, they begin to understand that death is
permanent and personally relevant. Getting hurt and dying may
become scary to them.

“Children’s fears grow along with their imagination. As they
can imagine bad guys and spooky things, that is when they start
to become scared of these kinds of things,” says Kennedy-Moore.

Dr. Amie Bettencourt, a clinical child psychologist at Johns
Hopkins Children’s Center in Baltimore, says the way kids
process scary things depends somewhat on their age, with most
fears being learned.

“Basically, fears or scary stimuli activate the fight-or-flight
response in all individuals — kids and adults alike,” she says.

“That is really our immediate reaction to whatever the feared
item is, and for young kids, this is their main response.”
As kids grow older and their brains develop more,
they may still have an initial response to
something scary, but they’ll also possess the
ability to reason it out, she says. “They have
more past experiences that they can bring to
bear there,” she adds. “It doesn’t necessarily
mean that in that moment they will use that
information, but they could.”
What’s particularly challenging is that
younger children don’t precisely know the
difference between reality and make-believe. “Halloween can
really bring that out,” Bettencourt says. “Are ghosts real? Are
goblins real? Are all those other costumes real, or is that make-
believe? We really don’t see kids have that capacity to differentiate
until around 6 or 7 years old.”
Kennedy-Moore notes that even though we can imagine
something, it doesn’t make it real or likely. “I say that every
day with clients—even adult ones,” she says. To help one client
who was afraid of anyone in a costume, she asked that person to
WashingtonFAMILY.com 13